The Nazi Past Underlying Politics Today

Americans like to recount the story about how George Washington, father of their country, would not tell a lie about chopping down his cherry tree as a child. Many Germans were similarly enamored of Helmut Kohl and the legend of the two pens he kept on his desk while serving as chancellor for 16 years. Deified as the father of German unification in 1990, Kohl was said to be so meticulously honest that he used a government-supplied pen only for official business and switched to another pen he had purchased himself for his private correspondence.

But today, less than two years after Kohl left office, the man once hailed as the greatest German statesman since Otto von Bismarck is the principal protagonist in a major political scandal involving secret slush funds and influence peddling by big business. Likened to Watergate, the scandal has resulted in the political destruction of Kohl and several other leaders of the Christian Democratic Union, currently the main opposition party in Berlin.

This tale of crooks and cronies has all the makings of a pulp-fiction thriller: suitcases filled with dirty cash, funny-money bank accounts, falsified and missing documents, phone taps, kickbacks, shady arms dealers and influential German industrialists with unsavory ties to the Third Reich.

Facing the possibility of several years’ imprisonment on various charges related to money laundering, embezzlement and illicit campaign financing, Kohl is expected to testify this week at a parliamentary inquiry into his party’s web of corruption. He has already admitted that the CDU violated the law by accepting secret contributions worth several million dollars in return for granting political favors to donors Kohl refuses to name. They are respectable businessmen who prefer anonymity, the former chancellor asserted, adding: “I did not steal or buy elections. I have not personally profited.”

But the truth is, Kohl seems to have profited throughout his political career by soliciting the support of big business--which he always received. The seeds of the current scandal were planted during Kohl’s early years as a CDU official, when he forged a close relationship with the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.

In 1966, Kohl became regional party chairman of the CDU in what was then the West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. But he needed additional sources of income to further his career.

Enter Fritz Ries, a wealthy German industrialist who took Kohl under his wing and introduced him to a charmed circle of chief executives, business heavyweights, and high-powered lobbyists. With Ries as his mentor, Kohl became the advisor to the Assn. of Chemical Industries of Rhineland-Palatinate-Saar.

It’s not clear if Ries, now dead, was one of the secret donors who illegally pumped funds into the CDU’s coffers, but this much is certain: He had a great deal of influence over Kohl. “Even if I call him at three o’clock in the morning, he has to jump,” Ries once boasted.

But who was Ries, and where did he get his money? During the Third Reich, Ries made a fortune from expropriating “Aryanized” Jewish property and from slave labor in factories near the Auschwitz concentration camp. Not only was Ries never condemned for his Nazi-era crimes, he went on to become the patron of several conservative West German politicians, including Kohl, who was elected chancellor in 1982. As a token of his gratitude, Kohl awarded Ries West Germany’s highest civil decoration, the Bundesverdienstkreuz or “Federal Cross of Merit.”

It gets worse: Ries retained as his legal advisor and chief of staff Eberhard Taubert, another compromised Third Reich veteran. During World War II, Taubert served as a judge on the People’s Tribunal, which handed down death sentences for such “crimes” as telling an anti-Hitler joke or sleeping with a Jew. Taubert was also employed by Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. In this capacity, he wrote scripts for several horrendous Third Reich propaganda films, including “Der ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”), which depicts Jews as rats and vermin. “Wherever rats turn up, they bring destruction with them. They destroy goods and foodstuffs and they spread disease . . . . Among animals, they represent an element of treacherous, subterranean destruction, just as Jews do among men,” the film’s narrator explained.

Like Ries and so many other Nazis, Taubert eluded punishment after the war. Instead, he found favor with the West German government and worked for the army’s Division of Psychological Defense. In addition, he was recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to serve as an espionage asset during the Cold War. “It was a visceral business of using any bastard as long as he was anti-communist,” explained Harry A. Rositzke, former head of the CIA’s Soviet desk. “The eagerness to enlist collaborators meant that you didn’t look at their credentials too closely.”

Taubert plied his cloak-and-dagger skills for the “Gehlen Org,” a CIA-sponsored spy network, based near Munich, that was run by Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, formerly Adolf Hitler’s chief anti-Soviet spymaster. Staffed by several thousand Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS veterans, the Gehlen organization functioned as the CIA’s eyes and ears in Central Europe, according to American University Professor Christopher Simpson, a member of the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group established by President Bill Clinton to review U.S. government documents related to Nazi activity.

By 1955, the Org had evolved into the Bundesnachtrichtendienst (BND), West Germany’s main foreign intelligence service. Gehlen’s appointment as the BND’s first director was emblematic of the wholesale restoration of Third Reich veterans to positions of power in West German society. Intent on turning West Germany into a strong, prosperous bulwark against Soviet-bloc communism, U.S. policymakers sanctioned the lenient treatment given to dubious characters like Ries and Taubert.

As part of the bulwark strategy, a privileged status was accorded the Christian Democrat Union, West Germany’s dominant political party, which enjoyed the support of Washington. It appears that German conservatives were spoiled by the Cold War climate that made their presence in government so reassuring to U.S. officials, fixated on containing Moscow.

In the interest of fighting communism, the United States turned a blind eye to political corruption in West Germany for years. Undoubtedly, this encouraged Kohl, who ran the CDU as his personal fiefdom for a quarter-century, to do whatever he thought was necessary to maintain his party’s grip on power, even if it meant breaking the law.

While we may never know the full extent of the current slush-fund scandal, it should serve as a reminder of how closely the Nazi era lies beneath German politics. Another example came to light last week when the Deutschland Foundation, closely tied to the CDU, gave its prestigious Konrad Adenauer Prize to Ernst Nolte, a controversial historian who has sought to justify Hitler’s anti-Semitism and downplay Nazi war crimes.

Honoring Nolte in such a manner shows the extent to which extremist thinking has penetrated the mainstream, metastasizing like a cancerous tumor in German ruling circles. It also underscores the dangerous possibility that the far right, energized by a growing intellectually based radicalism, could join forces with a nationalist, right-wing faction of the CDU at a time when many Germans are deeply disillusioned with the political status quo.

The CDU has long been almost a catch basin for an assortment of right-wing interest groups, including fascist elements that cling to the memory of the Third Reich. Paradoxically, this has both thwarted the success of Germany’s ultra-right-wing parties (flourishing in Austria and other European countries), while also perpetuating a political culture that has incubated the extreme right. But Kohl will not acknowledge the ugly “brown streak” that exists in his own party and in mainstream German society. *